izigame.me

I recommend this game VERY cautiously. It does NOT hold your hand. I thought I knew what I was getting into and I didn't, not one bit. System Shock shirks modern game design sensibilities even when it would be in its best interest to keep them. It's an extremely faithful remake with only a modern control scheme, UI, and audio/visual. There is a lot of design here that feels like it is only there to pad game length and waste time, such as enemy respawns, the very limited inventory, and the amount of backtracking you have to do to find that one key item you didn't think was a key item and dropped off somewhere, leaving it to be forgotten. Cyberspace has no continues and no saves, so if you die at the end of it, even in a sometimes cheap manner, then tough luck... you'll have to start over. It is ruthless, but it still plays by its own rules and respects your freedom to screw yourself over.

The longer I played, the more frustrated I got, and it felt like the game was dragging on. I was always interested in System Shock but the original was prohibitively obtuse. I was pretty excited for this one because of that, since the modern control scheme alone was going to really help things along. My main interest with System Shock was exploring the space station and experiencing the story with SHODAN and how things went down. The things I didn't like about the game started to stack up, and I went from using mods to just straight up gifting myself god-mode in the last act because I wanted to finish the game already and a lot of what I was doing just felt like tedium. Why save scum around when I could just not worry about health/ammo, you know? Why drop items just to pick up other items to turn into scrap and then pick up the items I dropped... over and over and over again... when I could just lower the sizes of all the items to one square and not have to worry about it? The enemy respawning was getting in the way of exploration and just felt a little cheap, especially with how much ammo I was wasting on them (and if you go for melee, you WILL get hit, so if you don't want to have even MORE tedium of going all the way back to a restore bay you're going to be wasting medpatches as well).

That being said, I still love the atmosphere. The story is awesome. You can tell that the game was very lovingly crafted as a perfect homage to the original, right down to the unique, pixelated textures. The weapons all felt pretty satisfying to use, although enemies didn't react to them very much until their ragdoll upon death. The music is great, although the elevator track does get pretty grating after a while. I'd still recommend this game, but you REALLY have to know what you're getting into. You have to be extremely patient and make sure you note down everything you do. Make sure you have strategies for what you're going to do with your items, even the ones you might think are pointless. I've seen a lot of people now say it's good to drop them next to elevators since they won't disappear. I wish I hadn't gone into the game completely blind because it definitely hampered my experience and I had to use not only a walkthrough, but mods and even cheats to help me finish the game if I didn't want to spend double the time on it. I've got other things to do, other things to play, and I did feel like the game didn't respect my time all that much. Still, it's a well-developed game and it has a lot of good things going. It might just lean on those old design fundamentals a little too hard at times.